Alan Colmes Called Out for ‘Cheap Shot’ Comments About How Santorum Dealt With Death of Baby

National Review Editor Rich Lowry and Liberal commentator Alan Colmes clashed on Fox News Monday when Lowry interjected to rebuke Colmes’ criticism of the way Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of their infant newborn Gabriel, who lived for only two hours in 1996.

“I even think some of the dastardly characters we have in the main stream media are not going to go as low as you just have Alan,” Lowry said at one point.

The heated rhetoric began early on in the segment when Colmes said undecided voters will ultimately not stick with the surging Santorum once people “get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after child birth home and played with it so that his other children would know that the child was real.”

“The childbirth in 1996 was a source of terrible heartbreak — the couple were told by doctors early in the pregnancy that the baby Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and would survive only for a short time outside the womb. According to Karen Santorum’s book, ‘Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum,’ she later developed a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that reached nearly 105 degrees. She went into labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant. After resisting at first, she allowed doctors to give her the drug Pitocin to speed the birth. Gabriel lived just two hours.

What happened after the death is a kind of snapshot of a cultural divide. Some would find it discomforting, strange, even ghoulish — others brave and deeply spiritual. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them. The next day, they took him home. ‘Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!’ Karen writes in the book, which takes the form of letters to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. ‘Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness.’ Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, ‘This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.’ ”

Lowry called Colmes’ description of the ordeal and bringing it up “a cheap shot.”

“To take something that is that personal and that hurtful as losing a child and mocking it like that … that is beneath you, Alan,” he said. “What you’re saying is contemptable.”

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